Contents

Description

Crash_handler is a crash report generator for embedded Linux systems. It uses
features of recent Linux kernels to capture process crash events, and save off
individual crash reports, as well as to record information
about the overall crash history of a device.

It is originally based on Android's debuggerd, which performs similar functionality. However, debuggerd requires that a dedicated debugging process be running permanently on the system, where crash_handler does not.

When a crash occurs, crash_handler collects information about the dying process from /proc, possibly from the kernel message log, and by using ptrace to query the process memory image.
This information is saved in a crash report. Up to 10 crash_reports are saved, before the oldest ones start being overwritten. Also, a crash journal file is maintained, which records information about the crash history of the device.

Features

Ability to capture crash reports on processes, with no modification to process or libraries